Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Thursday, March 07, 2013, 12:16 (4277 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

My examples of non-pre-emptive innovation involve changes in the environment which either demand or allow for a different way of life.
 
TONY: Neither one of these scenarios allows for any kind of experimentation, requiring that whatever adaptations/innovations occur MUST come into fruition fully formed and completely functional, or the result is death. That is one of the same issues that traditional Evolution faces.
 
In the first scenario, it depends how immediately life-threatening the environmental changes are. In the second, there is no threat to life, but a new environment offers new possibilities, e.g. instead of living in water, an organism might explore living on land. David has posted a fascinating article on "orphan genes", which tells us that many proteins "exist in a state of intrinsic disorder, flitting through thousands of different possible conformations, all the while remaining perfectly functional."*** This is how I imagine the whole system might work, though the apparent disorder may be due to experimentation. If species are in danger, they may well die out before adaptations/innovations come to fruition. If they are not, there will be time for "different conformations". But I'm not going to pretend for one minute that I've sussed out the mechanics of all this, and from my position on the fence, I think it's only right and proper for us to question ALL hypotheses.-Yours, as you phrased it last time, was: "God most likely developed an emergent design, where a relatively small number of rules and constants allow for a near infinite variety, and then built layers of information into that." I find the wording of this quite difficult to follow. By "developed an emergent design", do you mean he kept tinkering with the design as things went along? And does "then built layers of information into that" mean further tinkering? I shall have to repeat what I wrote for David on this subject. Do you believe that God pre-programmed the very first cells to pass the blueprint for sex/liver/brain down through countless generations of individual organisms and different species, or that every innovation was the result of his stepping in and fiddling with the genes? Do you think he grabbed hold of a pair of primates and reorganized their "internal physiology and psychological behaviors" (your terms) so that one minute they were apes and the next they were humans? Ditto for every single innovation you can think of: a programme dormant for a few thousand million years suddenly produces livers etc.; or God decides one day to put livers (plus all the necessary link-ups) in a collection of his existing creatures?
 
TONY: I do not think I have ever ascribed to God a 'human-type' awareness. His awareness is to ours what ours is to dirt's. I use human language, as pitiful as it is, to try and describe those characteristics, but it no more suitable than saying 'colorful' is to describing a sunset.-I'm trying to distinguish between levels of "intelligence". If I ascribe self-awareness, planning, purpose etc. (human-type attributes) to my first-cause version, I might as well call it God. But I don't mean this disrespectfully. If your God exists, then of course his intelligence and awareness are infinitely greater than ours. I too am using language to describe something indescribable ...a form of "intelligence" that is totally different from ours.-TONY: [...] there is a very definite time limitation in the case of cellular intelligence.-While your first-cause, self-aware God was "figuring it out" (prior to the Big Bang, if it happened), my first-cause, unselfconscious "intelligent energy" could have been experimenting with who knows how many earlier universes? -*** 
I had drafted my post before seeing your latest on this subject:-TONY: I think they, and you too perhaps, might be jumping the gun here. From the cycle I have witnessed over and over, scientist will say something is random and disorganized only to find out that there actually IS an organization behind it that they simply did not understand at the time of making the discovery.(Junk DNA anyone?) [...]-They are talking here about proteins, but I'm using their terms in a broader sense to describe my (hypothetical) process of innovative experimentation. The researchers also wrote: "Over time, the gene may come to be expressed in other tissues and evolve new functions." Whether these new functioning "patterns" may be attributed to chance, to your God, or to my "intelligent cell/genome" remains open.